Dispersion

by Greg Egan

This latest novella from Greg Egan, Australia's reigning master of hard, rigorous SF, is an astonishment and a delight. With great economy and precision, it tells the story of an unprecedented new disease—the Dispersion of the title—and its effects on both individual sufferers and the fragmented social structure they inhabit. In a world not quite our own, every living thing is born into one of six discrete “fractions” that are incompatible with—and often invisible to—each other. These fractions have coexisted peacefully for centuries, but now a disease has appeared that seems to drag the infected parts of the body into a different fraction. The effects are devastating. Individual victims suffer painful, protracted deaths. Entire communities turn against one another, and a state approaching perpetual war takes hold. Against this backdrop, Egan has constructed an absorbing account of people determined to confront, comprehend and ultimately overcome a disease that has no recognizable cause, that threatens to obliterate the bonds that hold the human community together. Like the best of Egan's earlier work, Dispersion is both wildly imaginative and plausibly detailed. It offers the sort of unique narrative pleasures that only science fiction can provide, and that Egan's many readers have come to expect. They won't be disappointed.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

160 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2020

About the author

Greg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion.

He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.

Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, solid, high-concept science fiction novella. This is set in a place where different villages are all out of sync with each other; they can only perceive and interact with each other when their cycles align. Think China Miéville’s The City & the City, or the one episode of ST:TNG where a transporter accident (never can trust that damn thing, almost as bad as the holodeck) left LaForge and Ro in a similar situation. Eat food from another village, your body will absorb it, and then you’ll be in for some significant discomfort when the cycle passes and those helpful proteins you absorbed just kind of fade away. The different villages have been cheerfully sort-of-co-existing for a long time, but a new disease has appeared that some people are blaming on exposure to the other villages. The story follows a researcher working in collaboration with scientists from other village (no mean feat) to try to trace the disease and find a cure. The ending is ambiguous, which some hate but I find that I adore.

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating tale set in a world where people are physically separated into six factions. To one faction, members of other factions are physically invisible, except at intervals when interactions between factions grow stronger, and they can start to see and interact with one another, only to fade away again. Non-living material can be made of up parts of all factions, so houses, etc. can be seen, felt and used by all. Ditto for writing implements (chalk) and there are scenes in this book where factions communicate with one another via ghostly hovering pieces of chalk that write.

In this world, people of each faction live in separate villages that trade with one another. As the tale begins, we learn of a town that has isolated itself from other factions because of a disease called the Dispersion. The disease causes parts of the body of a person to become disassociated with itself and become part of another faction, which is deadly. A girl from another village secretly visits it in order to get one of its scientific leaders to join efforts from other villages to study the Dispersion and figure out what is causing it and how to stop it.

As the group get together to study the Dispersion, with the help of volunteers who painfully contribute their own flesh for examination, radicals from the first town decide to take matters into their own hands over the Dispersion by attempting to get rid of the other towns by violent acts.

As matters come to a head, the girl, with the help of other versed in mathematics, make discoveries about how the factions interact with one another and how the Dispersion may fit into it and how it can be stopped. In a desperate attempt to prove her hypothesis, the girl deliberately infects herself with the Dispersion to try to cure herself.

While the beginning of the story may sound like some kind of strange, ghostly tale where invisible beings interact with one another, the story is grounded in the mathematics of multi-dimensional geometry (areas of interest to the author) and the characters start to make sense of how the interactions can occur geometrically and figure out how the Dispersion is another geometrical aspect of their world. The descriptions of various events (like invisible fires, floods and assassination attempts) also fit the world view where people can only see one-sixth of what is actually happening around them.

A fascinating tale of a world that is different from ours, yet feature the same kind of fractured politics, radical views and attempts to understand the world as it is.

[Bandit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love novellas. An absolutely terrific format, especially so for discovering new authors. Greg Egan is a pretty huge name in science fiction, one I was definitely familiar with, but have never read, so when this novella showed up on Netgalley, I requested, got approved for and read it right way. And walked away hugely disappointed. At this time Goodreads has no official description for this book and mine is the first review. For the former, I can try, but it was so muddled. And so the latter…well, I wish I had nicer things to say about it, really I do, but it just didn’t work for me at all. You can tell the writing was objectively decent, but the story…Ok, so it’s set in a world where everyone is born into one of six fractions that are incompatible with and are often invisible to each other. Somehow. At any rate, the have coexisted amicably enough for some time, but now the fractions are being ravaged by Dispersion wherein some of their bodies are dragged into other fractions. Somehow. No one quite knows how it works, so everyone is suspicious of each other and the situation is devastating to both individuals and their communities. Well, so far that sounds pretty intriguing, doesn’t it? But it’s so oddly liminal and intangible in structure, that it really relies on execution to work and here (for me, anyway) the execution really didn’t. The official description says it’s a world wildly imaginative and plausibly described, I didn’t find that to be the case. To me it was a very muddled opaque scenario, which didn’t exactly cohere. Somewhat reminiscent of The City and The City, only that one (weirdly enough) worked. But here the dimensions were juggled oddly. And the entire thing, the writing too, was peculiarly dispassionate and very difficult to engage with. You can try, you can draw social parallels to what’s going in the world today, it isn’t difficult, but in the end it just wasn’t that good of a read, not that interesting, not that exciting, not that fun. The overall effect was that bleak greyness vanishing into the fog that’s on the cover. Though it’s much nicer as artwork as opposed to literary work. I didn’t care for it at all and it certainly didn’t serve as a great introduction to a new author. The best thing about it was that it read quickly. It might sing for others, who knows. Thanks Netgalley.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a fable for our times filled with paranoia, political polarization, and mutual distrust of people who are really not so different from each other, with all of the worst tendencies of the people accelerated by a pandemic. For a hard science fiction writer like Greg Egan, there is no surprise that the solution is for people to focus on facts and work together to find scientific solutions. As always in Mr. Egan's books there is an interesting and complex science behind the story. In this strange world the matter that constitutes all living things and man-made items is divided into fractions so that you can only see and interact with the people, plants, animals and objects of your own fraction or the one other faction with which in a given day part you are in phase. It affects technology, medicine, social structures and human relations, so that it creates a world that is very different from the one that we live in but that is also clearly intended as a metaphor for our world. I'd like to report that the image that we see in Mr. Egan's mirror is hopeful, but it's a mixed bag - good people and moments of triumph, but also ignorant and angry people who do bad things and no promise that science will come to the rescue.

[S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given an ARC through Netgalley. I am thankful for this opportunity to give my honest opinion about this novella. This review will contain no spoilers for the actual plot of the book.

My first thought when reading the synopsis was that this was a world that I was excited to know. The "six fractions" that were the basis of creation seemed interesting, and the disease based on these fractions was fascinating. I loved how this was a "low-tech world" and was eager to see how this very disease would be solved.

Once I got into the story, however, I was sorely disappointed. I did not know where I was half the time as there was little-to-no description of the settings. This is particularly true between chapters when the settings change. When we finally got to the discussion of the disease, what it was, and what it did, I was confused. I also had a hard time looking past the fact that this was an info dump of a chapter. The writer gives the reader no breaks, even structurally. Sentences are ridiculously long and overcomplicated.

I was not drawn in by the characters, either. The way people speak has no nuance or characterization. Their vocabulary is ridiculously high for a low-tech (undereducated?) society. Our main protagonist, Alice, doesn't feel her age, and her characterization is fragmented. This is true for almost every other character in the novella. I can't tell you what these characters look like or how these characters are different from one another. They are vehicles for the story.

Often I found myself wondering what the author meant. I only have a vague understanding of how the "fractions" work, and I had to go back several times just to understand that much. This lack of understanding extends to small details of the world as well. I ended up skipping over the sentences that I had questioned, and frankly, it didn't matter in the end.

The work as a whole is fast-paced, leaving no room for reader misunderstanding. Additionally, there are tonal changes that feel as if the story has been patched together from different drafts. The first few chapters are polished (even if I have issues with the sentence structure), and then that polish drops off.

While I understand that I received a digital advanced copy of the work, the formatting was atrocious. It made some chapters painful to read. I sincerely hope that this is fixed before it goes to retail.

I also feel that the retail value of $40 is severely overpriced for a novella of this size. Even the name attached to the work does not justify this price. If I were to just take into account the quality of the work, I would say it's shameful to be charging that much.

"Dispersion" is set for publication August 31, 2020.


Overall rating: 2 stars
Would not recommend

[Elena Linville-Abdo]

DNFed at 47%

I'm sorry but when you struggle with finishing a 100 page novella, there is something very wrong with the story.

The concept was intriguing enough: six iterations of the same town existing in adjacent realities with different people living in each reality. Somehow they are aware of each other and somehow at least some of them can cross over and communicate, heck, even have children together. That would have been a wonderful idea to explore...

Unfortunately, nothing is explained about how that came to be, how come people can cross over and even exist in the other reality long enough to start a romantic relationship and have a child. Also not considered how being of dual realities would affect the child.

Instead we have a boring page after page of "pseudo-science" experiments while the scientists of all 6 realities try to to determine why people in all their towns seem to get afflicted by dispersion - when different parts of them suddenly shift to a different reality. Even that could have been interesting if it was written differently than pages of tedious explanations of theories based on non-existent science, which in turn made the author write additional pages to explain that science. Yawn... no thanks.

Also, the protagonist is a non-entity. She has no personality at all, she is just the mouthpiece for the science babble.

[Ralph Blackburn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dispersion by Greg Egan- As with most of Greg Egan's work, there's a big chunk of Math sitting in the plot and little is done to illuminate it's significance only that it shadows what is going on. The writing is, as always, smooth and well done, with engaging characters and modest movement forward. In a society divided in six fractions, states of being, a disease is invading and the only safe way to deal with it is each community faction must isolate themselves from the others(sound familiar?). A young woman, Alice, is out to prove this approach is wrong and its adherents are misguided. It's all rather confusing and a bit of a slog when you're trying to understand what parameters are being discussed and how to get a handle on this disease. I think if you have a mathematical curiosity, this might be smooth sailing for you, but for the rest of us, it's just too confusing.

[Tim Hicks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry, mate, I've been able to get a bit of a grip on some of your hard-hard-hard-SF stuff, but you lost me on this one. I was OK with Miéville's The City and the City, but this is the same only sixfold with a wild card. It's good to posit a scenario and then examine how we might research a problem in that scenario, but your reader has to have some clue.

If you've played the "Disco Elysium" game maybe you'll see a similarity -- you spend more than half your time trying to work out what the hell is going on here.

[Jameson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I haven’t read anything by Greg Egan before so I hope his other works are better, but I could not finish this novella. The writing is over-analytical and the storyline is rather confusing to the reader. In addition, the characters have zero depth.

[Bart · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars: this novella was okay, and that's no mean feat in and of itself. Why not three stars? It was too *one-dimensional*: Egan takes one idea, and builds everything around it. 2019's Perihelion Summer was a much, much richer novella.

(...)

As for the message: distrust and tribalism indeed will not solve most societal challenges this day and age, but when you invent a specific speculative scientific problem as the problematic setting, it’s obvious only science will get you out – even though the characters don’t necessarily perceive their predicament as scientific. In that sense, Egan is a bit self-serving and his parable doesn’t really work as a lesson: it kinda begs the question. It would have been more interesting to start with a problem that isn’t so obviously scientific in nature to us readers – but that would have taken an entirely different set-up.

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It

[Joe Karpierz · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be an understatement to say that 2020 has been a year unlike any other in our memory. Readers have had, I think, three reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic: those that don't want to read anything pandemic related, those that will read more pandemic fiction now than they ever have in the past - maybe trying to get a handle on what our genre has to say about pandemics - and those that keep right on going reading whatever it is they normally read, as their fiction reading is not affected by everything that's happening in the world around us.

Then there are the writers, who in all fairness are readers themselves and generally fall into the same categories as the rest of us. While it is true that the job of sf writers is not to predict the future, an oddly high number of them have released books in 2020 that deal with pandemics and the like. Heck, even Kameron Hurley's THE LIGHT BRIGADE, a Hugo finalist in 2020, mentions a worldwide pandemic, and that book was published in 2019. And in reality, most books that are being published in 2020 have been in the pipeline since late last year or early this year, before COVID-19 hit. What did they know that the rest of us didn't?

And so we come to Greg Egan's new novella, "Dispersion". Dispersion is both the title of the book and the name of the affliction that is affecting the world in which the story is set. Egan does not tell us where this planet is, how its population got there (if that is even relevant) or much else about the people in the story. What we do know is that there are six "fractions" (nations if you want to put a label on it, but I don't think that's even correct) who are incompatible and in many cases invisible to each other. The Dispersion appears - never explained, but I don't think it much matters in the larger context of the story - and infects members of each of the six fractions. Dispersion manifests itself by dragging detritus (for lack of a better term, I think) from foreign fractions into people and dragging parts of the infected people into the foreign fractions. People die a rather horrible death as a result.

The basic solution? Each fraction self-isolates (now where have we heard that before?) while a cure is sought. Alice Pemberthy is the scientist who is working on trying to figure this all out and come up with a cure. The odd thing about Alice is that her parents are from two different fractions - something which is never really explained, and I'm not sure has any relevance to the story (and if it truly doesn't have any relevance, why is the fact introduced at all?).

The story, then, is about the search for the cure and how the various fractions act toward each other during the course of the story. One fraction or another brings fires and floods to another fraction, in an effort to destroy those fractions they deem responsible for the problem. There is basically no trust between fractions, even as scientists from all fractions try to work out a solution to the problem.

Egan weaves a tale that in many respects is eerily like our own today. The world building is not expansive, nor does it need to be. Egan tells us what we need to know in order to understand what is going on, and not more. Alice, like the scientists of our day today, is doing what she can in order to come up with a cure to the Dispersion. As is usual with a Greg Egan story, the science is meticulously laid out; it's clear that, as with his other books, he's given a lot of thought to the situation. And the ending sure isn't what I was expecting, and I'm still trying to work it through in my mind.

While I liked Egan's previous story, "Perihelion Summer", better than this one, it's still a good read. And I really do want to know what writers knew that we didn't when they gave us stories like this that so eerily predict the situation we're in. I'll never know, and it really doesn't matter. What matters is the story, and it's a good one.

[Jenni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very high concept sci-fi, there was a lot of math concepts I didn't understand here. However, Egan has crafted an interesting world, and I loved how scholarly our protagonists were. I was actually caught off guard by the ending, and wished there was more. I'll pick up more Egan in the future.

[Vladimir Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Очередной мысленный эксперимент Игана описывает гипотетический мир, где все органические молекулы имеют по шесть разновидностей, так что любой живой организм, от бактерий до людей, существует в шести вариантах, т.н. «фракциях». У фракций есть поразительное свойство — они невидимы и неощутимы друг для друга. То есть, например, человек из одной фракции может гулять по городу другой фракции, и с его точки зрения, на улицах не будет ни души, а горожане в свою очередь не будут замечать гостя. И только в определенные короткие интервалы две фракции могут воспринимать друг друга. (зная Игана, уверен, что у всего этого есть строгое математическое обоснование, но будем для простоты считать, что это такая сложная магия)

Я для себя придумал визуальную аналогию — как будто каждый человек (строго говоря, каждое живое существо) в этом мире носит в кармане часы с одной стрелкой. Причем для каждой фракции стрелка вращается со своей скоростью, поэтому представители одной фракции видят друг друга всегда, а других — только в те короткие промежутки, когда их «стрелки» ненадолго совпадают.

Пока понятно? Отлично, вот теперь начинается самое интересное. Теперь представьте себе, что в этом мире возникла бактерия, «часовая стрелка» которой движется со своей уникальной скоростью, не совпадающей ни с одной из фракций. Она хаотично «материализуется» то для одной фракции, то для другой, попадает в организм, размножается... и не происходит ничего ужасного, бактерия абсолютно безвредна для человека. А через какое-то время «часовые стрелки» бактерии и носителя расходятся, она дематериализуется и покидает организм… вместе с теми тканями, которые успела заселить. Как правило, со смертельным исходом.

И вот врачи разных стран объединяются, преодолев непростые политические отношения между фракциями, и начинают исследовать этот феномен. Собственно, об этом и книга. Выдвигаются гипотезы, проводятся эксперименты, строятся матмодели... Написано, как обычно у Игана, суховато, без попыток изобразить живые характеры и увлекательные приключения. Чисто отчет о некоей научной проблеме и поисках ее решения. Просто в этот раз «проблема» смертельна для людей, так что ставки довольно высоки.

Довеском идет обычная игановская мораль, что предрассудки, невежество и взаимная озлобленность — наши главные враги, и только научный метод, рациональность и разумный альтруизм спасут человечество. Изоляционизм — игра с отрицательной суммой, сотрудничество — с положительной. Вроде и прописные истины, а все равно не повредит их лишний раз проговорить вслух (особенно в наши дни).

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a sort of tug-of-war feeling going on regarding this book. On the one hand, the premise of the setting is intriguing and I sort of want a longer book to explore how it all works; but on the other, maybe it only seems to work because the relatively short length justifies eliding details which might not hold up under scrutiny. A longer book would require more characters, and my experience of Egan's work (though only just some of his recent novellas) is that he does a good job exploring ideas, less so personalities; but I'm not sure if I quite like the story told here anyway; it is a bit too accelerated, too much focus on really intense things that happen almost too swiftly.

Generally, I don't like reading cover summaries because they seem to either spoil the story, or be misleading; in this case, I felt like the summary was almost necessary to understand the first few chapters since the concept is so esoteric it is hard to really grasp at first. And why six fractions? is it just for the sake of the story (I think only 5 or 4 would have been a bit easier, fewer characters to keep track of, when so many are just names) or is there some mathematical or scientific seed behind that number? And I could have done with a less ambiguous ending. Even if we assume that it indicates success and not hallucinations from Alice's stressed body, it was acknowledged earlier in the story that finding a cure might be only half the battle; convincing people of its effectiveness and repairing the damage of recent hostilities would be a story of its own.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another novella from the methodical but complex brain of Greg Egan.

Greg makes my head hurt. He comes up with ideas involving math or spatial dimensional variations that I just can't seem to see in my head. (See “Dichronauts”) But maybe that's the point: twelve-dimensional constructs (like in this book) can't really be visualized.

Greg is not known for strong character building, but his concepts are beyond what any other SF writer is doing, and he's been doing this for 30 years. Reading Greg takes time, because his concepts are hard to grasp and his characters seem to be hyper-intelligent people who vault ahead of the rest of us in understanding what is going on.

This novella might seem timely because it deals with a form of disease that infects the different co-existing towns that cycle through their twelve-dimensional space. A cure is difficult because you can't even interact well with the residents of the other towns, and paranoia and violence break out. The idea of multiple cities co-existing on top of each other but not interacting is reminiscent of Mieville's “The City and the City”, but in this case it is not a consensual agreement, but a physical fact.

While the ending seems to offer a resolution to the disease, it is so abrupt that it seems jarring.

I can't say that I've enjoyed most of Egan's latest work, but he's still producing the most mind-bending ideas in SF and I want to keep up with him.

[Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

If 4000/800 was Greg Egan at his most "normal", Dispersion is him at his weirdest. There were a few things about this novella that I liked. The faux-old-English setting was an interesting change of pace from the usual sci-fi fare. As usual, Egan's characters have carefully sketched individual personalities even if most of their dialogue is focused on scientific problem-solving. And the idea that Dispersion revolves around is quite cool—most matter is split into six "fractions" that are on a twelve-dimensional cycle such that any given two fractions can only interact at specific times. A dire conflict between villages in different fractions arises. The thing that kept me from enjoying this novella is that the way this system works, and the actions the characters take in studying it, are nearly incomprehensible. I think it would take multiple rereads to really understand what's going on here. But because the novella is more concerned with exploring this wacky idea, rather than saying something thematically interesting, or demonstrating a compelling character arc, a reread is a tough call even at ~130 pages. This one wasn't for me (I'd say it's only for people smarter than me).

[Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greg Egan is a name in the SF field as you probably know if you're reading a science fiction review. He has written a lot of stories and books over the years and is known for writing hard SF at its hardest (not difficult; hard science). That often leaves him with the challenge of thinking up a story to display and explore a world that demonstrates the concept (e.g., a universe where the speed of light is not constant). In this effort we have a world where six races of people are made of different, incompatible types of matter. They can only interact with the two races next them at brief but regular intervals as the world cycles through its routine. Early on some characters speculate about how and why this is, and the ideas are interesting and promise a new way to talk about race relations. Unfortunately, the story itself isn't all that engaging and doesn't really offer anything in the way of addressing the relations between the races. There are also some inconsistent rules about how matter interacts with the different races. I would say "4" for concept, "2" for execution.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mostly liked this. I was originally fascinated by this because I heard about it during the pandemic and it explores how different societies are composed of different "fractions" and can't really mix or interact or see members of the other. Then a disease comes in and everyone thinks it's caused by fractions getting too much exposure from others leading to one society completely isolating itself from others. Being written just before the pandemic this is what drew me to the book but really the story doesn't really explore this. It focuses more on the science of what is causing the disease and a possible cure. I also had a hard time with the structure where each chapter seemed to jump a bit both in time and tone leaving a bit undiscussed. With every new chapter I felt like I had to catch up. Finally the ending did leave a sour note but I suppose it's fitting.

[Zeb Kantrowitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's unusual for me to read a novel/novella and at the end not truly to have an opinion of the story that the author was trying to convey. Well, it does happen and this one left me more perplexed after I finished it than when I read the blurb for the book on NetGalley.

I don't consider myself to much brighter than the average reader, but if you can make sense out of this collection of words, let me know and I will kow tow to you. I felt that I had just read something by Proust in the original French (which I don't understand) or a random chapter from Ulysses.

It reminds me of the Nouveau Roman of the 1950s when everyone praise Sartre and his ilk for their antinovels, but to me was nothing but pretentious twaddle. So for me scratch this one and move on, nothing to read here.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story about a place where neighboring villages are somehow “out of synch” with each other so that the inhabitants cannot see each other. Only the inanimate objects. There’s some sort of periodic phase change every few days that brings some of the 6 different factions into synch with each other. A strange disease appears that basically results in someone’s body slowly fading away and killing them. Weird story but fascinating concept. The ending left a lot to be desired. I was really hoping for some kind of awesome exposition as to what the disease was and how they cured it. But it just kinda… ended.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greg Egan is someone that I've seen, but not read. Then I got the opportunity to read a Novella of his, which seemed a good place to start. Since novella, enjoyable to read. Will need to read some more of Greg Egan.

[Holly Mcentee · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea what this story is about. I gave up about halfway through.

[Douglas Anstruther · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novella with Greg Egan's unique creativity and hard science fiction. A what-if story where all matter is divided into 6 fractions that interact on a rotating schedule. Worth checking out

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strong start that quickly devolves into what reads as a rough outline draft. It’s a shame, because I think the concept itself is very strong. It just needed more time to germinate.

[Perry Middlemiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novella by arguably Australia’s greatest ever hard sf writer. The world of this novella is composed of material that is made up from one of six different “factions” that can only interact with each other momentarily. In an unknown country six villages are representatives of one faction each, but there is a new factor at play, a virus or flesh-eating cancer called the Dispersion that impacts all six factions and which each village blames on the others. The novella’s main character Alice works to understand the interactions between the factional material sand thereby hopefully find a cure to the spreading disease. Egan has obviously worked out the intricate interactions of the factional material as a mathematical problem and the translated these into the story. The end result is rather cold and, while interesting, is not up to Egan’s usual high standard. R: 3.5/5.0